What is GraalVM and why do we care?

For years, Java has suffered a lot of criticism. One of its biggest slights from the early days was its performance. While true to a degree, Java has made quantum leaps by adopting tactics that have allowed it to compete with other platforms at a raw performance level.

Nevertheless, people had continued to criticize Java over things that may seem inane, such as startup time. Indeed, a Java app, running inside its own virtual machine, isn’t as fast as Go or C++ binaries. But for the longest time, this has not been an issue, given web apps often have long uptimes.

However, new frontiers of production have exposed this weakness. Continuous deployment systems where 10,000 instances are running all at once and get replaced multiple times a day have made a 30-second cost begin to add up on people’s cloud bills.

A new player in the space of production systems has been executable functions. That’s right. It’s now possible...